Interview with Luthier Mike Lipe

By: Dr. Matt Warnock

With the economy taking a nosedive a few years back, it seems that two new paradigms have emerged in the guitar manufacturing sector. The first is that big companies such as Gibson and Fender lowered the prices of their products during the downturn, making their instruments more accessible to the average person, which many people took advantage of. But, there was also another more unexpected byproduct of the recession. People began looking for high-quality instruments that would give them the best bang for their buck.

Instead of turning their backs on private luthiers because of the cost, it seems people are starting to give more thought to buying a custom guitar, one that will be hand-crafted with the best material and that will keep its value over time. So, while the big guys may have seen an uptick in their lower priced models over the past few years, private builders have been able to survive where other’s failed because of the quality of their products and workmanship.

One of these luthiers, whose reputation and high-quality guitars have allowed him to survive the economic turmoil of the past few years, is California based builder Mike Lipe. Whereas the big names are turning to overseas factories and standard woods to build their instruments, Lipe uses American made hardware and exotic woods such as mango when custom-building a guitar. One would think that by going against the grain he would be alienating himself from the guitar buying public, but this is not the case.

By focusing on quality and personality in his guitars, as well as drawing upon many years of experience building instruments for some of the biggest names in the business, Lipe has been able to grow his business over the past decade, achieving a reputation among the guitar community for making some of the best sounding and most beautiful custom guitars on the market.

Guitar International recently sat down with luthier Mike Lipe to discuss his years building guitars at the Ibanez custom shop, the launch of his private company and his work with Michael Angelo Batio on the quad-neck guitar.

Mike Lipe with the Dean Michael Angelo Batio Quad-Neck Guitar

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Matt Warnock: Some private luthiers will only make one type of guitar, such as an archtop or flattop, or one kind of body shape, but you make all kinds of different bodies depending on what the customer wants. What was the inspiration behind offering such a side variety of body shapes?

Mike Lipe: Well, I worked at the Ibanez custom shop for quite a few years, and everything was special order because I just built for the endorsement guys, like Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Paul Gilbert, those guys. Everything I did was a special, custom piece. So, everything I’ve done through my building career was as a custom guitar builder, whatever you want I would build it. Pretty much staying to guitars though, I’ve done a few dulcimers and mandolins, but those were rare occasions.

Basically I’ve worked for companies for the majority of the time, besides doing some custom guitars on the side for myself or people I knew. When I decided to go out on my own in 2000, I had just gotten married and spent a year in Tahiti, just totally hibernating for a whole year. [Laughing] After returning from there, I realized that I wanted to build again. I had worked for companies. I had gold and platinum records on the wall from people I had built for through Ibanez, but I never got any recognition for myself, under my own name as a builder.

I’ve been working on guitars since about ’75 or ’76, starting out in music stores working with Fenders and Gibsons. When I started building I was trying to hit both styles of those guitars but with my modifications. I had the mindset that the wheel has already been designed but that I can tweak it and make it better.

Right now I’m down to two popular styles, which I have on the website, but when I first came out I tried to flood the market with what I had and maybe it was a bit too much. [Laughs] I’m in the process of reworking my website to organize my models better so that should be up shortly for people to check out.

Photo Courtesy of Mike Lipe

Matt: I noticed that you build chambered solidbodies, is that a signature of yours, so you only build chambered guitars, or is that just an option that people can choose when ordering a guitar?

Mike: I do both. What basically started me doing chambers was to lighten up the guitars. I would sell guitars to a lot of baby-boomers who, like me, are getting up there now and we’ve all got bad backs and stuff so the heavy guitars just don’t cut it anymore. I’ve got a ’69 Les Paul that I just can’t play at all, it kills me. It started off with that idea, and the Telecaster had a great sound to it, especially the Thinline models, so it came from thinking about those designs as well.

I do have some people that buy the chambers, but most of them are into solidbodies. I also make a couple models that are hollowbodies with set necks, but I don’t get a lot of calls for them. I’ve got about seven of those out there right now, but with things being tight in the economy, and these models getting up around $3,000, most people can’t afford to spend money on a guitar like that. So those are special guitars for people who want a certain guitar to play.

Matt: Apart from the design of the body, how much can someone customize when they order a guitar from your shop?

Mike: I was going to put down options on my website. I’ve been doing this for many years, I think I’ve used every pickup there is, so it started to look like it would take forever to choose from the menu. Also, a lot of these pickup companies have minimum orders and stuff so it’s tricky to just buy a few to use in a couple guitars for a customer.

I’ve tried every pickup out there over the years and my favorites are built by a guy named Jerry Amalfitano. He does the specs for me, however I want them or the customer wants them. I’ve always used him and I’ve tried to favor American parts, keeping the guitars American made. I’ve worked with the Japanese over the years and I just think that the parts aren’t as good, the steel just isn’t as good.

So that’s what I like to do, but whatever the customer wants to have the guitar I’ll do it as long as I can get my hands on the parts. Sometimes it’s hard to get pickups by a certain private maker, but I’ll do my best to make it happen. If I hit a wall sometimes I’ll ask the customer to send me the parts directly if they’ve got them, but the majority of the time I can get anything the customer wants as far as parts are concerned. There as tons of options, but I do recommend my favorites and then we go from there.

Matt: Do you have a lot of people coming to you with requests for specific woods, or do most people just describe their desired tone, feel and weight, then you suggest which woods would be the best fit?

Mike: Exactly. They’ll ask for suggestions, some people are set in stone and that’s OK, but most will ask for suggestions. There are really only four popular types of woods for the mass of the body that people ask for, mahogany, alder, bass wood and swamp ash. Those create different tones, so I’ll explain what the tones are and which pickups go better with certain woods. For instance, with swamp ash a humbucker will sometimes sound too muddy, so a single-coil will work better with that wood most of the time.

Then, the exotic tops I use are fairly thin, a quarter inch or so, and they don’t take a lot of tone away from the mass of the body. But, they do change things a bit, for instance maple will be a bit brighter than koa, for a drop top. I’ll explain that to people and a lot of that is just for cosmetics.

I have a guy from Bulgaria who does my videos for me on YouTube, he’s a great player and when it comes to tone the word anal doesn’t even describe his tastes. [Laughs] He really keeps me on my toes and I’ve asked him for suggestions with this and that, and he’ll give me his ideas for changes, which seem so minute, but to his ears they really make a difference. I’ve been using a lot of mango wood to build guitars, it’s got a similar tonal characteristic to koa but it’s a bit more unique and harder to find, and he’s able to tell me all the minute changes that mango brings to the table as far as tone in concerned.

I’m a player too, but sometimes I don’t have the time to just sit down and really play through this stuff, so I’m able to use him as my guinea pig for these woods, and he does an amazing job with giving me feedback and suggestions.

Matt: You’ve built guitars for famous players to hobbyists and everyone in between. Do you find there’s a difference in how people order a guitar depending on their ability as a player, or when it boils down to it are they all fairly similar?

Mike: I kind of approach everybody the same. Even when I worked with big named people, I had to go in and talk to them to get their specs and stuff, and I couldn’t do my job if I went in thinking they were god or anything. I had to treat them like anyone who wanted to order a guitar, I couldn’t see them as different or special, it wouldn’t have worked out if I did.

I treat everyone the same, but when a big name player says they want something done a certain way you can’t try and talk them out of it. They have a very good reason for wanting a certain thing done, even if it’s out of the ordinary, they know what they want it and so you just build it to those specs.

Matt: I have to ask this because there’s a pic of you on your site with Michael Angelo Batio’s four-neck guitar. I’ve been wondering for years who built that guitar, was that you?

Mike: I did, I built all of those guitars. The guy who built his first double-guitar was Wayne Charvel. Wayne was kind of a guru to me, he was always nice and tried to help me out in the beginning, with ideas and things like that. After that I had a shop in Burbank before I got hired by Ibanez, it was called “The Guitar Doctor,” and that’s where I first met Michael back in about 1983. When he went over to Dean they didn’t have anybody who could build the four-neck for him, so he called me.

I built like four double-guitars and the four-neck guitar. That was probably the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced building a guitar. That guitar has two Floyd bridges and two non-tremolo bridges, with four bodies and four necks, and the whole thing weighs 20 pounds. I tried everything I could to keep the weight down on that guitar, because you didn’t want to have this heavy guitar that looked cool but wasn’t playable.

After we built it we had to sit around and figure out how he was going to hold it. What kind of strap could he use to keep it in place and allow him to access all four necks. We thought about accordion-type straps, even a little stand to sit it on, and I never really found out what they figured out for that, but they worked it out in the end. That guitar can be broken down into separate guitars. You can have the two on the bottom, or the two on the top. You can actually interchange any of those guitars with each other as long as the left-handers line up together etc.

He’s a bit of a bizarre guy you know. To think of playing all these different things at one time is pretty intense I thought. That guitar was definitely my biggest challenge. He’s from the Chicago area, but he comes out here to do videos for Dean and he’d come buy and we’d talk about the guitar, try things out, and then finally he was happy with it. It took a while but we got it done.